Why I don’t invest in individual stocks
At my worst, I am an emotional investor.
In my article last week, I outlined emotional biases investors face when making decisions – admittedly I used to be privy to most. My investing history is littered with individual stock picks with varied returns; however, the overarching theme I noticed is that I could not beat the market.
What I mean by this is that my past portfolios solely consisted of a few hand-picked growth stocks that I falsely assumed would reward me with astronomical returns. Of course, some of these picks did considerably well but were weighted down by the majority of failures that sat in my portfolio.
The S&P 500 returned 25% last year whilst it’s favourite peer the Nasdaq Composite returned 29%. Unless you managed to…
